Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007
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The Woman who saw The Man Who Cried: A Study of Female Consciousness On Screen
by
Queen Mary, University of London, UK
In the film The Man Who Cried (2001), written and directed by Sally Potter, there are at least three male characters that cry on different occasions. It is not possible therefore to identify the subject of the film’s title as a singular male person. The focus of the film’s subjectivity is in fact a young woman, who loses her identity, is given another and then struggles to find her own. In this article, I will argue that the film represents female subjective consciousness through filmmaking that is visually, generically and musically experimental, inviting a haptic, or sensorily embodied, spectatorship which suggests further possibilities for the representation of consciousness on screen. I will draw upon the work of Laura Marks and her writing on the notion of haptic cinema, in particular the way in which she has described the eye acting as an organ of touch, and the philosophical thought of Luce Irigaray in relation to the creation and expression of female subjectivity.
Upon reflection, a more suitable title for this article might be ‘The woman who watched the man who cried’, which is far more suggestive of an active female presence, rather than the passivity simply ‘seeing’ could connote: but this too might be inappropriate, as in fact the woman in question does not always watch – or even see – the men crying. So, perhaps the most accurate title would be, ‘the woman who watches the men who later cry when she isn’t looking’! But what I want to convey by the title, and in my analysis, is the way in which the film’s subjective emphasis is on a woman and what she sees – how she looks (not how she is looked at), touches, smells and tastes – and not on a male protagonist as the film’s title might suggest.
Feminist film theory, most famously the work of Laura Mulvey in the 1970s and 1980s, identified the objectification of women in mainstream classical Hollywood cinema (Mulvey, 1975). Mulvey’s analysis of the active male gaze being brought to bear upon the passive female object (who is represented superficially as either a fetish or a spectacle) made a seminal contribution to film theory and, although much challenged, has illuminated the apparatus of mainstream filmmaking for the last thirty years. The strain of feminist criticism which elucidated the images of women in film, such as the ‘reflection theory’ of Molly Haskell (1987) and Marjorie Rosen (1973), was overtaken to a great extent by concerns with female spectatorship, but the problems with the superficiality of the representation of the female were far from resolved and mainstream cinema continued to offer little in terms of the unpathologized female perspective. There have of course been films in the classical Hollywood canon in which the narrative voice is ostensibly a woman’s, such as Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) or All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) and films which take as their focus the complexities of female experience, such as Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) or Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). What was not prevalent, I would argue, was on-screen evidence of women reflecting upon their interior, psychological lives, and in this way being the subjective motor of the film: woman as focus of on-screen consciousness, rather than narrative function or spectacular device.
In the last few years, however, there has been a move in filmmaking, most notably by female filmmakers, towards a greater concern with the representation of female interiority, some of which has been high profile and some fairly mainstream: for example, Under the Skin (Carine Adler, 1997), Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002), In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2002), Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003) and Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006). These films are experimental in terms of cinematography, performance and soundtrack and the way in which they foreground the interiority of a young woman. Similarly, The Man Who Cried is an original and groundbreaking attempt to convey a woman’s consciousness on-screen. Eschewing the conventional domination of narrative exposition, Potter uses music, visual imagery, sensory experience and cultural history to create an exploration of female memory and identity.
Potter’s explorations of the female voice and the constitution of a woman’s identity have been the driving preoccupations of her filmmaking career, blending narrative invention with theoretical and formalist concerns (Donohue, 1993, 217). The idea of a female quest has been prominent, as Potter revises women’s roles in films and other art forms, such as opera in Thriller (1979), and theatrical musicals in The Gold Diggers (1983) (Kuhn, 1990, 322). Annette Kuhn considers Potter’s filmmaking to be an example of a cinema of jouissance – a discourse which ‘sets up the possibility of sexual difference in spectator-text relations by privileging a feminine voice (1983, 169). Areas through which this voice speaks include relations of looking, narrative discourse, subjectivity and autobiography (Kuhn, 1982, 169). This is also achieved through structure: Thriller, for example, takes the tragedy of Mimi’s murder in La Bohéme and structures its investigation around the generic conventions of a Hollywood film noir, instating a woman’s questioning voice as the film’s organising principle (Kuhn, 1983, 169). The Man Who Cried is also generically complex, mixing elements of war and holocaust, romance and musical, and it too works by the instatement of a woman as the subjective motor of the film. This film therefore seems consistent with the Potter oeuvre, but also moves into new realms in order to represent female consciousness and it is therefore important to consider the film not simply as an example of an auteur’s canonical concerns.
The Man Who Cried has at its centre the young, motherless, Russian-Jewish Fegele. Following her beloved father’s departure to America and the promise of prosperity, their village is attacked and Fegele’s grandmother manages to send her away with a couple of local boys who succeed in securing her passage on a ship, they believe bound for America. Fegele finds herself however in England, with nothing but a photograph of her father and a gold sovereign stitched into the hem of her coat. Her identity is progressively anglicised by the officials at the docks (who name her Suzie), her adoptive parents and her teachers. One teacher discovers that Suzie has a striking singing voice, when, despite having been silent since arriving in England, Suzie spies a group of passing gypsies through her school gates and breaks into song – the same song that her father used to sing her to sleep with at the beginning of the film. The teacher then proceeds to teach her English hymns and songs, which she sings in a sombre and coolly detached manner, still evident in her audition as a young woman for a Parisian cabaret troupe. Suzie’s expressed ambition to make her way to America, as well as her attractive legs, earn her a place in the troupe. In Paris Suzie is befriended by the vampish social climber, Lola, who manages to secure them places in the chorus of a Parisian opera company. Lola focuses all her attentions on captivating the lead tenor, Dante, whilst Suzie is drawn to the silent, charismatic gypsy horseman, Cesar. These two relationships develop under the looming threat of war, and the characters are forced to make choices which define who they are, what they believe in and what they desire. Finally, Suzie is compelled to leave Paris when the Germans have invaded the city and Dante, out of spite, reveals her to be a Jew. Suzie ultimately arrives in America and is reunited with her father as he lies on his deathbed.
Suzie’s ‘progress’ then is from the her homely yet threatened Russian village, to the repressed, turgid banality of 1930s middle class England, to the decadence and passion of Parisian cabaret, the humble familial community of Cesar’s gypsy camp, and the Hollywood dream factory, where her father, believing she was dead, has forged himself a life as a movie mogul, with a new wife and children. The film consists of gipsy serenades, fireworks, horseback riders and operatic tableaux: ‘all the world is quite literally a stage’ (Capp, 2001, 2). These locations are performative spaces, which function as segments in the construction of Suzie’s identity as her historical and cultural memory are connected with and stimulated.
The elements which will be used to evoke Fegele’s childhood during the film are presented at the outset. Her father sings traditional, mournful songs; she runs through the ferns and pine trees, taking in their smell and touch, so that when these elements are revisited during the course of the film, the combination of the music and the sensory memory – sonic and haptic allusions – enkindle Suzie’s past, her childhood, her personal echoes. One scene shows Fegele standing amongst pine trees, closing her eyes and taking in their scent as she strokes the pine branches. Later, when in Paris, Suzie stands amongst snow covered Christmas trees, again she closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of pine: on both occasions, as Potter describes in the screen play, with ‘a look of longing on her face’ (2000, 21).
Film critic Rose Capp considers that the character of Suzie is ‘the least proactive and most underwhelming heroine the director has written for the screen. Silent for virtually the first third of the film, Suzie remains a frustratingly blank canvas, shaped by but rarely shaping other events or characters’ (Capp, 2001). I would argue, however, that this silence goes to the very heart of the way in which the film works: Suzie’s subjective consciousness is created by means other than the traditional dramatic devices. Potter’s premise is not a dramatic one, it is a musical one, and music, like other sensory experiences, can evoke memory and emotion in different and arguably more powerfully personal ways than words. Potter describes how, ‘A film can start from an image, a word, a feeling or a sound. In this instance, the original impulse came from music. The intention was to find a way of telling the story where music was carrying emotional and spiritual truth with as much force as the images and characteristics’ (2000a). This goes a long way to explain why the film functions as a musical evocation rather than a traditional narrative or dramatic exercise. Mixing and defying musical histories, operatic, classical, Russian folk and gypsy, enables the soundtrack to contribute to the disorientating blend of cultural references in Suzie’s past and present.
Suzie is not a blank canvas; she does study men and the world around her, but she is not a passive, suggestible or manipulable female character, which the notion of a blank canvas seems to suggest. She has had her identity erased through her experiences in England – her language, her cultural and social history, as well as her personal and familial memories – and has nothing but a photograph of her father and her sensory memories to rely upon. She is therefore unsurprisingly portrayed as wary and guarded: she is still, taciturn and self-contained, making no effort to please or impress others. She comes alive, however, when confronted with the musical fraternity of a gypsy camp and finds her voice musically. As the old men sing and play their instruments, Suzie relaxes and laughs. When she begins to sing her own mournful song, the musicians join in and accompany her, so that, for the first time, Suzie’s voice is echoed and bolstered in fellowship.
Capp says that, ‘The numerous contrivances of plot and character are thus ultimately at the service of the score.’ Again, I consider that Capp has missed the point, with this oversimplification. The plot is not at the service of the score, rather there is a symbiosis – the music and the visual imagery together concoct an evocation of female consciousness and the consolidation of cultural memory in relation to the Eastern European Jewish Gypsy culture. Generous amounts of screen time are given over to musical interludes, including Yiddish, gypsy, 1940s cabaret and classical opera.
The main male characters in the film are Dante, the bombastic, domineering operatic tenor, Cesar, the stallion-riding, brooding gypsy, and, of course Fegele’s sympathetic father. The men are symbolic, suggestive presences, each of whom function to affect Suzie’s quest. The father, wraith-like in his ephemeral presence, grounds Suzie through his presence in the photograph but paradoxically also serves to emphasise her lack of groundedness by his absence and unavailability. Dante, the fierce, resentful Italian, having dragged himself out of poverty and peasantry (which he so angrily punishes Suzie for reminding him of) serves to reinforce what Suzie is not – she will never leave behind or reject her roots. Cesar offers Suzie affinity and romantic love, and, along with Madame Goldstein, Suzie’s elderly Jewish landlady, serves to awaken and strengthen Suzie’s gypsy and Jewish heritage: again, not just through words, but through food and music. Madame Goldstein mumbles in Yiddish, which stirs Suzie and reminds her of something she has heard before; realising their shared heritage, the elderly lady invites Suzie into her rooms and feeds her. In a moment of Proustian-like remembrance, Suzie dips a cake (a madeleine?) into her drink and reconnects with distant bodily recollections.
The film’s literal Hollywood ending reunites Suzie with her dying father as she sings to him in the hospital, and it seems to me that narrative credibility here is irrelevant. The film is book-ended by scenes of Suzie apparently drowning in stormy seas surrounded by fires, as a bomb sinks the boat carrying her and Lola to America. It is therefore feasible that the finale is fantasy, Suzie’s dying thoughts of what might have happened had she made it to America. This is not so important however as the image of Suzie singing to her father and being shown as having reconnected fully with the memories of her childhood through the sharing of a song.
The film’s point of view is Fegele’s/Suzie’s – from the beginnings of her life as a little girl to the growing awareness of her own identity and the historical, political, social and cultural impact of the war, played out against the background of spectacle, in particular, male spectacle and performance. Fegele is captivated by her father’s singing, as she is stirred by Dante’s voice and excited by Cesar’s horsemanship. These instances of public showmanship contrast with the tears which each man sheds in private. Potter describes how, through Suzie’s eyes we witness the loss and devastation wreaked on men in war, their separation from their families and loved ones, and even from themselves (Potter, 2000, xii). But, as Potter expresses, a cry is also another word for the voice in song, ‘celebrating and expressing that which cannot be expressed any other way; the longing to be connected, the longing to transcend pain and oppression, the longing for joy and for love’ (2000a).
Although rich and theatrical in its musical spectacle, this film is more than visual: it appeals to other senses, other aspects and realms of representation. The work of Laura Marks has been pioneering in her approach to the idea of embodied, or haptic, cinema; in particular, the way in which filmmakers working between cultures use the visual medium of cinema to transmit a physical sense of place and culture. In Marks’s ‘haptic visuality’, the eyes function as organs of touch – triggering physical memories of smell, touch and taste (Marks, 2000, 162). For Potter, in The Man who Cried, ‘all the main characters are people on the move, and music holds a key place for all immigrants’ (2000a). The film therefore serves as a fictional demonstration of the efficacy of the cultural evocations which Marks draws together. Marks writes how, through haptic visuality and haptic spectatorship, immigrants can sensorily experience smells, tastes and touch which resonates with their cultural histories. Marks describes how the skin of the film in these instances is not a screen but rather a membrane that brings its audience into contact with the material forms of its memory (2000, 243). This film introduces a further level of haptic experience, in that the protagonist herself is reconnecting with her cultural history through embodied sonic and haptic experience; the spectator then shares the awareness of the bodily memory and engages with Suzie through non-verbal channels.
This sensory, embodied filmic experience begins to answer Irigaray’s call to explore the non-visual in order to express the feminine in a new language: ‘If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story’ (1985, 214). Stressing the importance of listening in a way which is both active and passive, Irigaray writes how music allows sharing with the other in difference before and beyond any word or cultural specificity: ‘It is easier to communicate through different music than through different languages, because these are often coded by a masculine subject to escape or surmount a maternal origin. Music generally expresses both a natural and a spiritual belonging’ (Irigaray, 2004, 101). This Irigarayan perspective on music as a means of communication which enables difference and individuality makes sense of Suzie’s self-expression through song. Irigaray writes, ‘The vocal message is made with the body itself and printed on the body of the other, which remains the place of its memory’ (2004, 102). This embodied experience for Suzie, enveloping her distant memories of song and her making of memories through her own song, also includes silence. Suzie and Cesar ‘talk with silences’ (Potter 2000, xi). For Irigaray, silence is itself a gesture and a means of communication: ‘to succeed in holding a dialogue with the other, a space must be kept which belongs neither to the one nor to the other’ (2002, 103). Irigaray suggests that it is in safeguarding silence that a woman can reach a language appropriate to her subjectivity – vitally, not an imposed silence but of an economy of silence consciously founded by the woman herself. Representation of silence is clearly a challenge for the visual arts: Irigaray herself wonders how silence might be expressed in a painting (2002, 103). With cinema there is of course sound and moving image, enabling verbal silence to be accompanied by performance, cinematography and soundtrack, thereby fleshing out the function and effects of the silence. This creates a further realm of communication with the spectator, watching in silence in the cinema theatre.
This brings us to the other possible ‘woman who saw The Man who Cried’ – the woman in the audience. The film demands an engaged spectatorship as one is invited into the realm of interaction with Suzie – not just in receipt of information or dialogue, not directed as to what to think – rather shown how she feels and afforded the possibility of feeling along with her. These evocations do not have to resonate with our own cultural memory; this engagement is a meeting at the interface of the representation of Suzie’s consciousness and our own immersion in the filmic text. At that meeting point, in a place not created by dialogue, speech or scenography, is the construction of Suzie’s consciousness. All Suzie has with her on her quest is a photograph of her father – she doesn’t have a tangible grasp on what she is looking for any more than we do and worries that maybe she has been chasing a ghost. It is not necessary as a spectator to have concrete knowledge of the certainties that these sensory triggers relate to. Potter succeeds then in her aim, to utilise ‘musical strands which express cultural difference and universal sentiment; the voices of insiders and outsiders, each with a reminder of our commonality’ (Potter, 2000). As a poignant perspective on this universal sentiment, she has created a representation of a woman’s consciousness which is originally and boldly communicative and resolutely particular.
Capp, Rose, 2001, ‘Crocodile Tears: Sally Potter’s The Man Who Cried’, Senses of Cinema, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/14/man_who_cried.html
Donohue, Walter, 1993, ‘Against Crawling Realism: Sally Potter on Orlando’, Sight and Sound, 1993, vol.3, no.3, reproduced in Pam Cook and Philip Dodd 1993, Women in Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, London, Scarlet Press, 217-223
Haskell, Molly, 1987, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press
Irigaray, Luce, 1985, This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press
— 2002, Dialogues, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press
— 2004, Key Writings, Continuum, London and New York
Kuhn, Annette and Susannah Radstone (eds), 1990, The Women’s Companion to International Film, London, Virago
Kuhn, Annette, 1982, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul
Marks, Laura, 2000, The Skin of the Film, Durham and London, Durham University Press
Mulvey, Laura, 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol.16, no.3
Potter, Sally, 2000, The Man Who Cried, London and New York, Faber and Faber
— 2000a, The Man Who Cried, CD notes, Sony Music Entertainment Inc.
Rosen, Marjorie, 1973, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream, New York, Coward, McCann and Geoghegan
All that Heaven Allows, Douglas Sirk 1955
The Gold Diggers, Sally Potter 1983
The Man Who Cried, Sally Potter 2000
Mildred Pierce, Michael Curtiz 1945
Morvern Callar, Lynne Ramsay 2002
Now Voyager, Irving Rapper 1942
Rebecca, Alfred Hitchcock 1940
Thriller, Sally Potter 1979
Under the Skin, Carine Adler 1997
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